The Care and Keeping Of
by narcolepticbadger
Summary: Erin simply attracted danger, and attracting danger invariably meant attracting Holtzmann, as easily as calling a moth to the edges of an open flame. Or: Holtzmann observes a relationship between Erin and near-death experiences and decides to do something about it.


She had liked Erin immediately, buttoned-up and lingering, awkward, in the doorway of their lab, had liked teasing and flirting at her for the way it made Erin stare, all the while fiddling with the edges of her skirt as if she could straighten her self-consciousness away.

She liked even more how easily Erin became intrigued, despite herself, by anything abnormal - first the EVP, then Aldridge Mansion, and underlying it all ( _slowly_ , she thought, _but ever so surely_ ) Holtzmann herself.

With curiosity lighting her eyes, everything about Erin opened outwards, and Holtzmann had turned away from tinkering with the cyclotron more than once to find Erin watching her (well, hastily looking down at her own work or bustling off to find Kevin) as if she were something equally strange and new and worth careful studying.

Yes, she _liked_ Erin, but it wasn't until the night Patty led them into the subway tunnel that she began to realize this liking might be something different, deeper - the kind she didn't know what to do with.

She felt the punch of sparks flying up underneath them as they dragged Erin back to the platform, her fingers fumbling at the grounding collar a second before the train streaked past, and they all collapsed backwards in relief, the thrill of the near-miss marking them momentarily invincible.

And it was then, with the air thick with burnt metal and all her senses firing full-fury, that Holtzmann looked at Erin shuddering beside her and imagined the electricity trapped under her skin, the lightning storm that might build between their tongues if she were to lean in to kiss her.

The hairs on the back of her neck lifted, every inch of her charged and stirring with this promise of burning out from the inside.

...

Science and ghostbusting came with intrinsic elements of risk, a sharpness that lingered over skin like the bite of something wild, and this was precisely what made them both worth doing (and doing _properly_ , meaning _somewhat dangerously_ ), in Holtzmann's mind.

It didn't take Holtzmann long to determine that she and Erin each had a knack for courting danger - Erin reluctantly, Holtzmann herself with the kind of mad, chronic bent that resulted in lab fires and chemical burns more often than she should possibly admit.

(It also resulted in all of her best inventions, impossible things made real in her hands, and was it any wonder she traded on occasional acts of recklessness in order to keep pushing firmly against the laws of the universe?)

Still, she had to acknowledge that Erin, in the short while they'd been working together, had nearly-died more times than the rest of the team combined, an especially impressive feat given Holtzmann's love of flammables and Kevin being, well, _Kevin_.

Erin simply _attracted_ danger, and attracting danger invariably meant attracting Holtzmann, as easily as calling a moth to the edges of an open flame.

It was, Holtzmann thought, always a pleasure to burn.

...

The impulse to kiss Erin passed (mostly) with the moment, shuttled down Holtzmann's list of Important Things in favor of wanting to rebuild, wanting to do it all _again_ with a proton pack that had all the power they needed.

She was already running through the calculations for new equipment in her head, exhilarated by the churn of her heart tight under her skin, when Erin stared down at her hands and too-calmly said, "I almost got killed."

They were all running high on adrenaline and the prospect of actually making this ghost-capturing thing _work_ , and Holtzmann blurted out, "Yeah, I know - it was so awesome," because it _was_ awesome and because danger could only be laughed at and because she didn't want to think about almost-deaths when everyone around her was _fine_.

Abby echoed her _awesome_ , and Erin didn't reply, and Holtzmann couldn't read anything from the rigid line of her shoulders. She wondered if, just now, Erin was remembering exactly who had shoved an untested, highly unstable particle accelerator into her arms and volunteered her to be on the front line.

Who - if you wanted to speak in technicalities - had almost gotten her killed.

She nudged Erin's arm with the toe of her boot, softly but not _too_ soft, and waited to see if it was all about to explode in her face.

But Erin just sighed, "Awesome, yeah," and flicked another fingerful of ectoplasm onto the tracks with more force than necessary.

She was glad Abby was there to herd them onto the next downtown train, already muttering about Bennie's knees and appropriate ratios of wontons to broth as if it were understood that they would go back to the apartment above Zhu's to debrief, decompress, before re-scattering across the city into their separate lives.

As if it were understood that they were _together_ now, with lives that intertwined beyond working hours - a sisterhood built from the strange and the obsessive and the lonely parts of them all.

People started inching down the subway car as soon as Erin squelched to the center pole, half-heartedly apologizing with a little wave and an "It's, um, not what it looks like. Really. Hard to explain."

Holtzmann took advantage of the extra-wide berth given to them by immediately flopping down across three seats, tucking one arm around the smoke-scorched power cells she'd salvaged from the tracks and one beneath her head. If she cricked her neck slightly, she could get just the right angle to watch Erin from below.

"Honestly, you're not even close to being the weirdest thing in this car," Abby whispered while patting her arm. "It might be Holtz and her portable death trap that's making them edgy, or that lady in the corner with the serial killer-y eyes."

"You think so?"

"Oh, yeah. I think they see you more as a collective body shield in case one of the others goes off first."

Erin narrowed her eyes at that, visibly diagramming her proximity to the "others" - Holtzmann waved helpfully up at her - Abby had identified. She was definitely the closest.

A runnel of slime was lazily migrating down the back of Erin's leg, and Holtzmann fought the urge to catch it with a finger, trace it upwards to the source, as it pooled around Erin's heel.

"That stuff really _does_ go everywhere, doesn't it?" Holtzmann said admiringly, and Erin's eyes flicked to hers long enough that she could see the play between annoyance and interest and fatigue there, felt herself trying to turn the innuendo into a more sympathetic overture with some kind of disarming grin.

(Frankly, she wasn't sure _disarming_ was a word that could ever be applied to someone who built nuclear reactors for kicks. Mad scientists didn't _do_ disarming. And yet… there was something about Erin, and her eyes, and her stupidly tiny bowties, that made her want to be _soft_ , if only she could figure out how.)

Erin all but ran for the shower upon their return, disappeared long enough that Bennie came and went and left cooling wonton soup (well, a hazy yellow liquid masquerading as soup) in his wake and Abby and Holtzmann began to actively theorize that the ectoplasm had a will of its own, one that was obsessed with hygiene.

"Should one of us go -"

"Did we know there's no hot water in the building? Like, ever?" Erin asked, hugging herself, as she shuffled around the corner. She was bundled up in her MIT sweatshirt and a pair of navy sweatpants that looked suspiciously like Kevin's for the way they hung off her, her narrow frame made even narrower by the extra weight of fabric.

She frowned defensively when Abby quirked an eyebrow at her. "What? No one else keeps clothes here - I had to improvise."

"I didn't say anything."

"I know that eyebrow."

She waved off the leftovers that Abby tried to push on her with a wrinkled nose, and when several attempts at conversation stuttered out into silence, they each gradually gravitated to different corners of the apartment: Abby to the kitchenette, Holtzmann to her lab table, and Erin staying motionless in the booth.

Half-reclined in her rolly chair, feet propped against an old combustion engine she was stripping for parts, Holtzmann watched Erin pull out an old issue of _Physics Today_ and flip to an article in the middle, eyes fixed to the page in apparent fascination.

The charade fell apart somewhat when, after fifteen minutes, she was still staring at the same page. _Physics Today_ wasn't _that_ dense.

The small-and-introspective thing Erin was doing made Holtzmann feel weird - this was Erin but _not_ Erin, not the one who ate as fast as she talked and said things like _Conductors of the Metaphysical Examination_ with complete seriousness.

Not the Erin who smiled and sometimes, tentatively, head-bobbed along to Holtzmann's dance mixes, and Holtzmann was starting to worry that she had broken that Erin.

Abby was familiar, predictable in her comforts and needs when she'd had a particularly long or trying day (hint: it usually involved soup), where Erin remained an unknown variable that Holtzmann was still trying (and apparently failing) to quantify.

Neither soup nor the musical stylings of Devo or Dexy's Midnight Runners seemed _right_ , suited for the moment, and so the care and keeping of one Erin Gilbert continued to prove itself more complex than Holtzmann had anticipated.

She was better with actions, with objects, than she ever had been with words, and this was why she found herself elbow-deep in a desk drawer, feeling around for the junk food she had stashed there (kitchen cabinets were for losers) earlier in the week.

She wanted something sweet - sugar always made a better offering than salt - and finally settled on a bag of neon-bright gummy worms, tearing into the package with her teeth before she kicked off of the desk and steered her chair over to Erin's side.

Her back hit the table with a soft _thump_ , but Erin hardly acknowledged her presence.

"'The graphene–semiconductor Schottky junction,' eh?" Holtzmann read over her shoulder. "That always gets my vote when I'm in the mood for a little light reading."

She waggled the bag of gummy worms under Erin's nose, effectively cutting off Erin's view of the article and finally drawing her eyes upwards.

"A pretty _Lumbricus terrestris_ for a pretty lady?"

Erin bit her lip as Holtzmann shoved a few worms into her own mouth. "You keep those in the lab? Next to all the chemicals?"

Holtzmann shrugged, talking as she chewed. "They taste better this way. Probably the massive amounts of radiation."

"Um, no. No thanks, Holtz, I'm good."

"Hey, wanna see if they glow in the dark?"

"You know, I think I'm gonna pass. Get back to the, uh, gripping world of Schottky junctions."

Holtzmann tried not to let the dismissal sting. "If you're sure… we could be conducting some _pretty_ sick metaphysical examinations with these…"

" _Pretty_ sure, yeah."

Holtzmann used the table as leverage to push her chair back across the room, wheels squeaking pathetically (and not a little annoyingly, which wins a smirk from her) all the way. She bent back over her newest project, intending to let whatever weirdness there was in the room blow over, but the harder she tried to force her concentration onto the soon-to-be Faraday cage in her hands, the harder it was to keep her eyes anywhere but on Erin.

Abby would know what to do to get Erin out of her funk. But asking Abby felt like cheating, or, worse still, like an admission of guilt or of hopeless, puppy-eyed yearning.

After a few more minutes of distracted tinkering and two instances where her sleeve almost caught fire, Holtzmann gave up and wandered into the kitchen herself, determined to find something more palatable to offer Erin - something Erin would actually accept from her.

(It seemed important, this giving and taking, an equation in need of skillful balancing on her end.)

What was it people wanted after nearly getting splatted by a G train? Alcohol? Chocolate? Tea? None of them cooked anything more complicated than coffee in the apartment, but Holtzmann thought she had seen a few miscellaneous things squatting in the cabinets, left behind by previous renters. She might get lucky.

She clambered onto the kitchen counter, kicking her legs against the wood as she levered herself up, and began exploring the cabinets methodically. An old bundle of receipts, a dented can of lychee fruits, a box of macaroni all thunked to the ground, useless.

Abby poked her head around the doorframe, summoned by the noise she was making. "Do I even want to know, Holtz?"

"Research."

"Okay. Well, you know where the fire extinguisher is."

In the fourth cabinet, her hand closed around a box of something, and she scraped off a layer of dust to reveal a package written entirely in Chinese characters.

Enlightening.

Inside were dry, greenish twists of something that _could_ be tea leaves, if Holtzmann had to guess what tea was supposed to look like in its natural state. She didn't know what tea was supposed to smell like either, but this one smelled appropriately medicinal (musky?), which - by the laws of Holtzmann's universe - meant it had to have _some_ kind of healing or calming effects.

She set to boiling water and dumping the leaves in, swirling them around and watching them expand into wet blobs before fishing them out with a fork as best she could. A few spoonfuls of sugar, a mug stolen from the Higgins Institute, and Holtzmann had her best attempt at a soothing cup of tea.

(Like most things in her life, it was an experiment, and therefore prone to bouts of spontaneous combustion.)

Erin had made some actual progress on the article by the time she plonked the mug down by her elbow. "Here."

Erin reached for it automatically, then frowned as she took in the floating blobs in what she had probably assumed was a cup of coffee - paint-strippingly strong, the way she liked it.

"What is that?"

"Tea."

"Tea?"

"A popular beverage made out of leaves and herbs and… magic. You give it to people. To make them feel better." Holtzmann looked at Erin's increasingly skeptical expression and continued with a quiet, "In theory."

Erin seemed to soften at that, her lips turning up at the corners while she lifted the mug closer to her mouth. "That was really thoughtful of you, Holtz." Her eyes widened abruptly as she got a proper noseful of the, ah, _aroma_ rising from its contents. "What, what kind of tea did you say this was?"

"Why don't you try it and find out? Scientific inquiry, and all that."

"Right. Okay. In the name of science."

She looked pained as she set her lips to the rim of the mug, taking the absolute tiniest sip possible. The effects were immediate - Erin's whole body stiffened, and her eyes were glassy as she slowly lowered the cup back to the table.

It was the face of a woman who had _seen_ (or in this case, tasted) some shit, and Holtzmann had to suppress the dangerous urge to laugh.

Once Erin had managed to swallow, she murmured, "Oh, that is… that is… _mmm_. I'll just… hold onto this, then. Thanks."

Holtzmann wondered if she should take the tea back and free Erin from the obligation of holding it for the sake of politeness, but the opportunity to watch Erin (mildly, ridiculously) suffer was far too amusing to let pass.

She popped a two-fingered salute and sauntered back to her side of the lab, determined to make some real headway on the Faraday cage this time. Even if she did steal the occasional glance at the booth.

True to her word, Erin had wrapped both hands around the mug and held on, and Holtzmann thought she looked warmer and lighter for it with each passing minute - the tea hadn't been a _total_ disaster, then. Maybe it had even been something right.

"Hey, Holtz, do you have any more of those gummy worms?" Erin called, breaking the silence-that-had-become-companionable with a familiar glint in her eye.

Yes, Holtzmann might just be doing this right after all.

...

Holtzmann was better with actions, with objects, than she ever had been with words, and tea was just the beginning.

She gave Erin her pocket knife, for protection, and designed a proton cannon (her best gun) particularly for Erin's long arms - and for the way Erin set her face in a firefight, all guts and scrappiness.

She left Pringles and mallomars in Erin's filing drawers, tucked between the books on her work table, little reminders to eat when things got too hectic for them to sit down and do it properly.

(And, no matter how often Erin rolled her eyes and denied that she needed the extra push to stay fueled, Holtzmann noticed that the mallomars always went first, and more than once she had watched Erin lick mallow-y sweetness off her fingers with a contented smile when she thought she was being discreet.)

The longer the Ghostbusters worked together, the more they came to realize that the slime _did_ seem to have a personal vendetta against Erin. After one particularly wet encounter with a Class III phantom in the basement of an art gallery, Holtzmann had helped sluice ectoplasm out of Erin's eyes and hair and lent her a shirt - an oversized button-down she had, actually, never gotten back.

(It had looked better on Erin anyway.)

The next time, Erin inhaled at just the wrong time and nearly drowned in slime, all of them huddling around her for long, tense minutes as she coughed and coughed and tried to get her breath back.

When she stood back up, shakily, and assured everyone she was fine, Patty was the first to shake her head emphatically. "Right, I'm starting to think we need to get this one some full-body armor, stat. That is _not_ cool, man."

They started to gather their gear up and head back to the car, Erin in the lead, and Holtzmann half-ran a few steps to catch up with her. She slung one arm around Erin's shoulder and leaned in close, grinning fiendishly. "You still look pale. Do you need mouth to mouth?"

She heard Abby and Patty's joint, under-breath _oh my god_ behind them and resisted the urge to turn around and wink, just to double their exasperation. But Erin didn't pull away, and Holtzmann left her arm where it was, letting their bodies settle into a single rhythm as they walked.

It felt intimate, suddenly, and Holtzmann tried very hard not to think about the proximity of her lips to Erin's neck, or the way their hands could so easily brush and catch, fingers slowly intertwining.

(Instead, she thought about it all the way back to Zhu's, eyes flickering up to the rearview mirror to watch Erin in the backseat until Patty threatened to take the wheel from her.)

...

They kissed for the first time under a full moon, and Holtzmann couldn't remember who had started it.

She had always imagined their bodies in motion - finally meeting - in terms of physics: the friction of her hand against Erin's hair, the force with which their lips might meet, the gravitational pull that seemed to spring up between them whenever they were in the same room - hell, the same _city_.

But the reality was so much gentler than that, void of any lightning, or burning, or tension, this venture into getting what (who) she had wanted for so long.

She didn't know how to _do_ this, didn't understand things that were so removed from the sciences of destruction, and maybe… maybe that was okay.

(She had always been a quick learner, and never had she wanted to learn something - some _one_ \- as badly, as thoroughly, as Erin Gilbert.)

She came to marvel at the way Erin could slow the mad tick of her brain down, how Erin could slow time itself down when she ran her mouth along Holtzmann's collarbone, when she played with Holtzmann's unruly hair, when she slid a hand tentatively along Holtzmann's inner thigh.

This slowness was newfound, unexpected, a settling force over Holtzmann's fears, though she knew love, as all things, came with _risk_ \- and this is what made it worth doing properly, if somewhat dangerously, in her mind.

This is why, sometimes, she held a hand to Erin's chest after making her come, leaving wandering kisses down Erin's shoulder as she felt the frantic beat of a heart (of two hearts, her own quickening in response) and knew its thrill.

Knew now how danger, and care, and keeping weren't so different after all.

* * *

It's always a little intimidating to write for a new fandom, but this fic turned out to be a lot of fun!

Let me know what you thought, and feel free to leave me prompts or come say hi to me here or on tumblr (I'm loveexpelrevolt). Thanks for reading!


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